music, he has developed particularly
close relationships with John Adams
and Meredith Monk. During Gershon’s
tenure, the Master Chorale has offered
forty-five world premières. At the re-
cent gala at Disney, only two compos-
ers out of twelve—Lassus and Bach—
were no longer living. A number of the
others are based in Los Angeles, rep-
resenting the city’s staggeringly diverse
communities. The lineup included Mi-
chael Abels, who has collaborated with
the filmmaker Jordan Peele; the Phil-
ippine-born composers Saunder Choi
and Nilo Alcala; and Reena Esmail, an
artist-in-residence.
In March, I went to the First United
Methodist Church, in Glendale, to watch
the chorus in rehearsal. The group was
preparing Arvo Pärt’s “Te Deum”—a
contemporary classic of sacred music,
contemplative on the surface but charged
with tension. Few technical issues came
up. Every few minutes, Gershon would
say something like “Beautiful, guys” or
“Just gorgeous.” His concern was to find
a narrative thread in Pärt’s outwardly
static conception. The Te Deum hymn,
he pointed out, “starts at the most cos-
mic, universal, talking about all of cre-
ation,” and “eventually goes to the most
personal level—‘Salvum fac populum
tuum.’ ‘Lord, save your people. Keep us
this day without sin.’” He went on, “This,
for me, is the crux of the piece. This idea
of asking that we go one day without
doing harm.”
Gershon identified a spot, just be-
fore solo sopranos sing “Salvum fac pop-
ulum tuum,” where this turn toward in-
timacy could be made manifest. In a
passage that ends with “glory everlast-
ing,” the harmony ultimately turns from
D minor to D major, as it often does in
the work. Gershon said, “As we head
toward that D major, just fluff up the
sound a little bit, so that the D major
is the most natural consequence of the
radiance of the sound.” At a concert at
Disney, a week later, the singers height-
ened that shift with a subtle but palpa-
ble increase of tonal warmth—another
case of precision yielding wonder.
W
ith the help of donors, the Mas-
ter Chorale was able to provide
some support for its singers during the
covid-19 shutdown, but the pandemic
was a difficult period, economically and
otherwise. Gershon told me, “For us,
it’s always been about the idea that
singing produces well-being. Suddenly,
we were in a situation where singing
is one of the most dangerous things
you can do. Choruses were Exhibit A
as superspreaders. That took a psycho-
logical toll.”
The ensemble began a new season
at Disney last November, with a
program devoted to Rachmaninoff ’s
“All-Night Vigil,” written during the
long night of the First World War.
Gershon shaped this austere score so
that it conveyed a gradual lightening
and brightening, even as the basses
touched repeatedly on abyssal tones.
In the penultimate movement, “Thou
didst rise from the tomb,” the tenors
gave particular emphasis to a climac-
tic ascent from C to G: this had the
effect of sun breaking through a lu-
minous mist.
No less stirring was a performance
of Frank Martin’s Mass for Double
Choir, in February. This was under the
direction of Jenny Wong, the Master
Chorale’s assistant director, who wrote
a dissertation about Martin’s choral
music. The Mass was composed in the
nineteen-twenties but withheld from
circulation for decades; Martin ex-
plained that he had considered the piece
“a matter between God and myself.”
Wong has identified clandestine allu-
sions to Bach’s B-Minor Mass, espe-
cially in the Agnus Dei. Her scholarly
insights no doubt contributed to a ren-
dition that was pristine in sound and
purposeful in motion.
The second half of that concert was
given over to music by Esmail, who ex-
emplifies the chorus’s forward-looking
spirit. The child of Indian immigrants,
Esmail often draws on Hindustani
musical traditions. The highlight was
“When the Violin,” for chorus and solo
cello, a gently ravishing setting of a text
by Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladin-
sky: “When / The violin / Can forgive
the past / It starts singing... .” The Mas-
ter Chorale and the cellist Cécilia Tsan
nimbly negotiated the score’s Hindu-
stani gestures, which were seamlessly
woven into a four-part texture modelled
on Renaissance polyphony. Once more,
an imaginary space of ideally resonat-
ing voices materialized, this one hover-
ing between centuries and continents.